Jewelle Taylor Gibbs and James Lowell Gibbs Jr. on their wedding day in Ansonia, Conn., 1956.Credit
DeWhitt Keith

“We were always the first this or the first that,” Jewelle Taylor Gibbs said as she looked back on her 60-year marriage to James Lowell Gibbs Jr.

They met in 1954 when he was a graduate student in anthropology at Harvard and the university’s first African-American resident tutor. She was a senior at Radcliffe and the only black student in her class.

Both recall that their courtship involved many long conversations over coffee. He was a quiet intellectual while she was an outspoken, vivacious one who could be fierce when debating issues like civil rights and minority hiring.

“She was quite well dressed, and she wore her clothes well,” Mr. Gibbs, now 85, said. “I remember particularly a red velvet halter dress.” He could not remember, however, how or when he proposed to her. Nevertheless, an announcement of their engagement appeared in The New York Times on June 3, 1956.

“Our families were pleased and proud that the announcements were included on the social pages,” Ms. Gibbs, now 83, said in an email. “But we were also keenly aware that this editorial decision was symbolic and reflected the changing racial attitudes in American society.”

Just months after the wedding, the couple moved to a Liberian village where Mr. Gibbs began an anthropological study of village life. The couple lived in a mud hut with rats running over the roof.

“It was not easy,“ Ms. Gibbs recalled. "We didn’t have electricity or plumbing or television. There were adventures every single day. We became very good friends, which I think is the basis for a good marriage.”

There were more firsts to come for the couple. In 1966, they moved to Palo Alto, Calif., so Mr. Gibbs could take a job as an anthropology professor at Stanford. He eventually became the first tenured African-American professor there.

“This ‘first black’ designation was a mixed blessing,” Ms. Gibbs wrote in her 2014 autobiography, “Destiny’s Child: Memoirs of a Preacher’s Daughter.” “You are expected to represent the whole race, you are always under the microscope, and you can’t afford to fail.”

When their two sons, Geoffrey and Lowell, were 4 and 6, she began pursuing a master’s degree in social work at the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to earn a Ph.D. in psychology, and eventually joined the Berkeley faculty.

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Jewelle and James Gibbs, photographed in Oakland, Ca. last fall. Their engagement and wedding announcements appeared in The Times in 1956.Credit
Jim Wilson/The New York Times

In 1970, Mr. Gibbs became the first dean of undergraduate studies at Stanford. There was a growing number of black students on campus and a pervasive sense that racism was waning.

“My husband and I were much more optimistic in the ’60s than we are today,” Ms. Gibbs said. “We saw change happening rapidly and it was good change. Then, all of a sudden, we hit this wall.”

In 2010, they moved to a retirement community in Oakland.

Death does not seem to scare either of them. They have chosen side-by-side cemetery plots, and Ms. Gibbs, who still enjoys dressing up for parties, has begun giving her clothes away. “It’s part of the last stage of life,” she said. “I hope I’m going somewhere where I don’t need a lot of winter clothes.”

Continued

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An oil portrait of a woman believed to be Sarah Grant hangs in the New Haven family room of Wendy Grant Haskell, 63, who is a psychotherapist and the Grants’ great-great-granddaughter. Credit
Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

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Beside Sarah hangs what is believed to be a portrait of her husband, John Grant. Both portraits were painted by an unknown painter around 1851, the year of their wedding.Credit
Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

Portraits of a man and woman believed to be Sarah Mullett and John Grant, depicted around 1851, the year of their joyous union.Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

The debut issue of The New York Times on Sept. 18, 1851, known then as The New-York Daily Times, contained one wedding announcement, and one wedding announcement only, for the newlyweds Sarah Mullett and John Grant. He was 26 and she was 23. The ceremony took place at the Trinity Episcopal Church in Fredonia, the town in western New York where the bride had grown up. The bridegroom was from Jamestown. They were married Sept. 10 (though from the smudgy looks of the article, the Times reporter got it wrong and reported Sept. 15), by the Rev. T. P. Tyler. The announcement was a mere sentence, a bare-bones beginning for a Times institution.

Based on old newspaper clippings and census reports, it appears that the Mulletts were a prominent family in Fredonia. The bride’s father, James, epitomized upward mobility. He grew up on a farm in Vermont, the oldest of 13 children, and made his way to Fredonia, where he became a self-taught lawyer (such a thing was possible in those days). He eventually became a State Supreme Court justice.

The bridegroom was a cousin of Ulysses S. Grant, then an Army lieutenant, who would go on to become a general and president.

Today, oil portraits of John and Sarah hang side by side in the New Haven family room of Wendy Grant Haskell, 63, who is a psychotherapist and the Grants’ great-great-granddaughter. Each is wearing black, and a similarly dour and humorless expression, as if they had whispered to each other beforehand, “Don’t smile!”

“I think they are trying to project importance, status and prestige,” Ms. Haskell said, adding that the portraits were probably painted soon after the wedding.

(When I first called Ms. Haskell to inquire about John and Sarah Grant, she was flummoxed; I think she thought I was trying to sell her a Times subscription. When I explained my reason for calling, she said she had no idea the Grants had appeared in the newspaper’s first wedding announcement. “What a hoot!”)

Her brother David Marshall Grant, an actor you might recognize from “The Devil Wears Prada" or his Tony-nominated performance as Joe Pitt in “Angels in America,” said: “I would guess, looking at those portraits, that it was a less joyful time. I’m sure there were struggles just to get by. I can’t imagine what it was like just to make breakfast. I’m angry when there’s a line at Starbucks.”

John and Sarah Grant’s lives probably did not turn out exactly as they envisioned. After the wedding, they settled in Jamestown, where John was co-owner of a grocery store dealing in tea, fruit, molasses and salt, among other products. Sarah kept house, according to the census, and had a live-in Irish servant. The couple had one son, James Mullett Grant, who married and also had one son, Havens Grant. Then, sometime before the turn of the century, James Mullett Grant traveled alone to Havana and never returned.

“John and Sarah Grant were all about the promise of being a really significant couple starting a whole line of prosperity, but then look at what happened,” Ms. Haskell said. “Their son fell off the edge of the earth.”

On June 2, 1883, John Grant’s obituary appeared in The Evening Observer, a local newspaper. As brief and terse as his wedding announcement, the notice merely reported that he had “dropped dead” in his home at age 60. Sarah Grant died 29 years later.

Then things got even more interesting.

The couple’s grandson, Havens Grant, went to Yale, became a lawyer in New York City, married a free-spirited poet and ran a moonshine business on the side during Prohibition.

Today, the Grant descendants gather every Christmas at Ms. Haskell’s home in Connecticut and take a family photo with John and Sarah’s portraits in the background. In a recent photograph, everyone is wearing colorful tie-dyed scarves or shirts. David Marshall Grant appears with his husband, KC Reischerl, and their daughter, Evelyn May Reischerl Grant, who is 6 and the youngest descendant. She is also the only female family member in the photo. Ms. Haskell’s three sons are gay and appear with their partners.

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Sarah and John Grant’s descendants and their partners in 2014. Click the image for a who’s who.Credit
Wendy Haskell

Ms. Haskell’s son David Haskell is an editor at New York magazine and is carrying on the family moonshine tradition. He is a co-owner of Kings County Distillery, which is based in Brooklyn Navy Yard and makes craft whiskeys.

What would John and Sarah Grant think? If they were to see the lineup of gay couples in tie-dye, David Marshall Grant said, “I think they would think they had gone to Mars; it’s an astonishing example of what happens in time.”

Lois Smith Brady wrote the Vows column from its inception in 1992 to 2001, when she moved to Aspen, Colo. She still occasionally writes Vows columns.

Editor’s note: There is some debate about the date of the portraits pictured above. Are they from 1851 or 1830-something? Do they depict John and Sarah Grant or earlier ancestors? Read more here.

Of course, not all wedding stories had happy endings. On June 6, 1855, The New-York Daily Times ran a Page 1 story on a wedding celebration turned tragic: “At a late hour it was found that most of the party, who had partaken of a lot of custard, were suffering from the effects of some deadly poison.”

“There were so many affected that the number who escaped were scarcely able to attend to their friends, and the greatest terror and consternation prevailed,” the reporter continued.

“Upon examining and analyzing the custard, it was found to be strongly impregnated with arsenic … some 20 or 25 of those who partook of the poison were not expected to live,” including “the young and beautiful bride.”

At press time, there were no suspects.

Editor’s note: Many readers wanted to know what happened to the couple and their guests. We researched and we have good news: the bride and groom survived and went on to have seven children. Read more here.

In 18 months, the Civil War would begin, but, in the meantime, New York’s newspapers were still savoring spectacles of a less-forbidding nature.

One such affair was the Oct. 13, 1859, marriage of Miss Frances Amelia Bartlett, 18, to Señor Don Esteban Santa Cruz de Oviedo, 55, at the old St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
A New York Times article headlined “The Marriage of the Season” said the nuptials marked “indeed an epoch in our social history.”

Mr. Oviedo, a Cuban planter, was worth, in today’s dollars, more than $135 million. He was said to have showered Ms. Bartlett during their courtship with jewels, 75 robes and other gifts.

The bride, who met Mr. Oviedo during one of his visits to the United States, was described as a “belle at Washington, Saratoga and other lands and localities.”

The wedding drew a great crowd, and most eyes were on the bride. The Times’s reporter suggested, “This lovely cynosure of all eyes evidently did not fear the public gaze, nor needed to fear it.”

The reporter continued: “About her neck, itself a pearl, she wore four rows of shapely Orient pearls, looped into a festoon by one slight rib of gleaming diamonds, gathered into the likeness of a knot of love. From this knot depended a single pear-shaped pearl, dipped in diamonds of surpassing lustre and beauty.”

Not everyone was so complimentary.

A rascal named Edmund Clarence Stedman wrote a lengthy poem, titled “The Diamond Wedding,” that appeared in The New York Tribune and suggested a mercenary motive behind the union. Among the cutting lines:

I do not wish to disparage;

But every kiss

Has a price for its bliss,

In the modern code of marriage;

And the compact sweet

Is not complete

Till the high contracting parties meet

Before the altar of Mammon.

The bride’s father, Washington A. Bartlett, a former Navy lieutenant who also served as chief magistrate of Yerba Buena, a village that was a forerunner to San Francisco, was incensed with the poem, and demanded a retraction, according to “A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age” by John Tomsich. Mr. Stedman responded by offering Mr. Bartlett a duel, but he declined, claiming the writer was below his social station.

Twenty-three years later, Ms. Bartlett was again in The Times, marrying for a second time to Bodo von Glümer, a German baron and a colonel in the Mexican Army, at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan.

It looked rather unremarkable, just one short paragraph tucked at the bottom of Page 1 with the headline “Ida Wells Married.” Yet the wedding announcement, published in The New York Times in 1895, was anything but unremarkable. That the nuptials of a black woman, born into slavery 33 years earlier, could make the front page of The Times, speaks to a woman who was, by definition, remarkable.

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Ferdinand Lee Barnett, the husband of Ida B. Wells.Credit
University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center

By the time Ms. Wells married Ferdinand L. Barnett in Chicago, she had risen from being orphaned as a child to one of the most forceful voices against the lynchings of black Americans. A muckraking journalist, she investigated the true motivation behind a vicious lynching in Memphis — a white businessman’s retaliation against a successful black store. In 1892, she was run out of the city, after she wrote about her discovery that white mobs often murdered black men under accusations of rape to cover up consensual sex between white women and black men.

At a time when women still did not have the vote and black Americans were fighting for basic civil rights, Ms. Wells, outspoken and passionate, refused to live within the roles defined for people like her. Three decades before Rosa Parks was born, Ms. Wells was arrested after refusing to give up her seat in a whites-only railroad car and then took her case all the way to the Tennessee Supreme Court, where she lost.

She was a feminist long before it was popular and “a race woman” when the leadership of the growing civil rights organizations of the time were resoundingly male. She refused to be sidelined by white feminist organizations, which worried that working for the equality of black women would slow down progress on rights for white women, and was marginalized by organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which she helped found.

A sharp-tongued career woman uninterested in being tied down, Ms. Wells had many suitors before meeting her match in Mr. Barnett, a lawyer, “a race man” and a fellow feminist. Still, once she agreed to marry, she postponed the wedding three times in order to keep up with her rigorous antilynching speaking schedule.

When the day finally came, the 27th of June, 1895, the event was fitting for an icon. “The interest of the public in the affair seemed to be so great that not only was the church filled to overflowing, but the streets surrounding the church were so packed with humanity that it was almost impossible for the carriage bearing the wedding bridal party to reach the church door,” Ms. Wells wrote in her autobiography.

The bridesmaids wore lemon crepe dresses set off with white ribbons, slippers and bows, and the bride strolled down the aisle in a white satin trained gown trimmed with orange blossoms. Newspapers, for both white and black readers, reported on the affair.

Ms. Wells, an originator of “leaning in,” did not allow marriage or motherhood to change her focus on career. “Having always been busy at some work of my own, I decided to continue to work as a journalist, for this was my first love,” she wrote. “And might be said, my only love.”

A painting of Caroline Webster Schermerhorn. Her own wedding to William Astor in 1853 received no announcement, but, after that, it seemed she never gave another party that didn’t make the newspapers.Credit
Carolus-Duran

When The New York Times (then still called The New-York Daily Times) made its debut in 1851, New York society was the exclusive domain of the Knickerbocker elite, the descendants of the Dutch and English merchants who had arrived in New Netherland in the 17th century. For this old-money set, marriage announcements were déclassé. Those who needed to know already did, and weddings had yet to become public social events.

But the city was changing. Through marriage, an emerging class of industrial titans had begun to assert itself on upper-crust turf, and it was the marriage of a Schermerhorn to an Astor that changed everything.

Their 1853 wedding received no notice: It was still unseemly to announce a Knickerbocker wedding in the newspapers. But everyone certainly knew that the marriage of Caroline Webster Schermerhorn to William Astor would be the biggest power coupling of 19th-century New York. The match connected one of New York’s oldest families with one of its wealthiest. Caroline was a daughter of the city’s Dutch aristocracy; William was a grandson of the merchant and real estate magnate John Jacob Astor. In consolidating new money with old New York, their marriage portended the arrival of a newly influential elite.

After she elbowed a sister-in-law out of the way to become known as “the Mrs. Astor,” Caroline set about remaking New York’s social world. It seemed as though she never gave another party that didn’t make the newspapers.

To wit: For all but the 0.1 percent of the era, invitations to her daughter Caroline (yes, also a Caroline) “Carrie” Schermerhorn Astor’s 1884 wedding to Marshall Orme Wilson were impossible to come by. Even a guest list of 2,000 was a byzantine array of rankings, tiers and omissions — guests included Stuyvesants, Pierreponts, a bearded former general and president and, very grudgingly, Vanderbilts (Mrs. Astor found the Vanderbilts unbearably nouveau riche). Only 250 people were invited to the ceremony itself; B-listers were merely asked to the reception.

The party may have been exclusive, but it wasn’t private. In fact, anyone with two cents, the cost of the paper at the time, could practically be there. The article in The Times the next morning vividly conjured the gown bedecked with diamonds and orange blossoms, the $75,000 necklace draped across the bride’s décolletage and, minus the couple’s new mansion, every opulent gift on display. There were more details, and gossip aplenty, to come in the weeks that followed.

Mrs. Astor hadn’t been thrilled about the match, her own mixed marriage aside; Marshall Wilson’s father was a former Confederate general and a railroad magnate of recent vintage. Any tawdry details The Times omitted — like the staggering $400,000 marriage settlement the Astors demanded from the Wilsons — appeared in The New York Tribune or The New York Herald or the scandal sheet American Queen.

Parsing power couplings, reading between the lines to spot a smudge or two of dirt, getting a look at that expensive gown — sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The wedding announcements let us in on the maneuverings of those at perhaps the joyous peaks of their lives, which remains a seductive draw for audiences today.

Jacqui Shine is a writer and historian. She wrote “Bonfire of the Inanities,” about the history of the Styles section, for The Awl.

When Lizzie Connor kissed her husband goodbye and hopped on a train at Grand Central Depot, The New York Times took note. An article written about the couple in 1885 was not a wedding announcement, but a news story that noted a serious peculiarity at the time.

Ms. Connor was white; her husband, Titus Poole, was black. And we believe that the article, headlined “Married to a Negro,” was one of the newspaper’s earliest mentions of an interracial couple. Four generations later, the couple’s descendants have drawn the attention, and sometimes scorn, of outsiders because of several boundary-defying unions that followed. Today, they have roots that are black, white and Native American.

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Credit
Kate Worum

It appears the writer of the article did not interview the Pooles, but instead retraced their steps across southern New York State over several days, stringing together a dispatch that reads like a gossip column, with bits of information, like Mr. Poole’s “handsome suit of broadcloth, with white vest, white necktie, and buff kid gloves,” from those who had observed the couple. The article also misspelled Mr. Poole’s surname and misreported the couple’s ages.

Even more rare than their interracial relationship was the Pooles’ adoption of a white baby girl, named Lillian. “Simply unheard-of,” is how E. Wayne Carp, an emeritus history professor at Pacific Lutheran University, recently described the adoption, which he called a “one-in-a-million case,” because of the “raging racism against mix-race married couples” at the time.

Bryan Treadwell, the Pooles’ great-grandson, now 68, says he identifies racially as “other.” He hadn’t known until The Times tracked him down last year that his great-grandparents were an interracial couple, but he did know that Lillian Poole, his white grandmother (and the Pooles’ adopted daughter), defied racial mores by marrying Harold Treadwell Sr., who was part black and part Native American. They gave birth to Mr. Treadwell’s father, Harold Marvin Treadwell Jr., in 1925.

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A family photo shows Lillian Poole Treadwell, Bryan’s grandmother, who was white but identified closely with the black community, seated at far left.Credit
Erik Jacobs for The New York Times

After his grandparents divorced, Lillian Poole Treadwell continued living in an all-black neighborhood of Ithaca, N.Y., where she attended a black church and “fit right in,” according to Mr. Treadwell, who was born in 1948. “She sure did pass on the black pride to my dad [her son],” he said in an email. “Miscegenation rules!”

Mr. Treadwell’s father, Harold Jr., proudly identified as black, but his three sons were listed as white on their birth certificates at the insistence of their mother, Evelyn Treadwell, who was Portuguese, “so life would be easier for us,” Mr. Treadwell said.

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A family photo of Bryan Treadwell’s parents, Harold Marvin Treadwell Jr., who identified as black, and his wife, Evelyn Treadwell, who was Portuguese.Credit
Erik Jacobs for The New York Times

The document was not enough to mollify the parents of Bryan Treadwell’s wife, Deborah, who is white. At one point, they persuaded her to break off her engagement to Mr. Treadwell, he said, but their influence was fleeting, and in 1984, the couple married and settled on Cape Cod, where they live now with their two sons. Their connection to Deborah’s parents remained strained for years, the unease often coming to a head at family gatherings. “We got to the n-word a couple times,” Mr. Treadwell said.

But like his great-grandparents, who displayed their relationship publicly, knowing that it made others uncomfortable, Mr. Treadwell seems uninterested in the challenges that his marriage presents to outside parties.

Mr. Treadwell suspects that, like him, his great-grandparents were motivated by something much simpler than propelling society toward inclusiveness. “I think I did the right thing,” he said. “I married the person I was in love with.”

On March 23, 1897, when a reporter for The New York Times attended what he described as “probably” the first Muslim wedding to occur in New York, there was uncertainty as to whether it constituted what would now be termed “fake news.”

It wasn’t entirely clear if the ceremony uniting Mohammet Ali and his bride, Ayesha, was even real. So the reporter sought confirmation of its authenticity from Oussani, the proprietor of the Cairo Cafe at 34 West 29th Street, where the ceremony took place.

“He swore by the beard of the Prophet that it was as genuine as they have anywhere,” the reporter wrote.

Why all the skepticism?

It seems that the event was taking place at a time when fake Muslim weddings were something of a fad. Such weddings, often with elaborately costumed performers, were staged as a form of entertainment that also allowed Americans to learn about the Middle East, said Peter Manseau, curator of American Religious History at the Smithsonian Institution.

The curiosity about Islam coincided with the arrival of immigrants from the Ottoman Empire. Known as “Syrians,” they mostly came from an area known as the Levant, now parts of modern-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Israel.

Most of these “Syrians” were Christians and Jews, but some were Muslims.

Muslims, however, were not new to America. Some of the Africans who had arrived in chains were Muslims, but their faith was usually lost within a generation or two of slavery. Muslims were among those who fought for the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War.

So there was good reason to believe the 29th Street ceremony could have been, if not the city’s first Muslim wedding, at least genuine.

Costumed men, whom the reporter recognized from performances in Coney Island, sparred with swords. An orchestra played and a “priest” in a turban officiated. (Muslims don’t have priests, but they do have respected scholars.)
The cafe felt sufficiently oriental, the reporter wrote, “provided one did not look round to see the Americans who had come to see the show.”

The bride was dressed in the Muslim fashion, with most of her body and face concealed. The groom wore an embroidered jacket and billowing pants.
The bride’s manner was convincing, too: “She apparently was quite in love with this good-looking young fellow, with black mustache and slightly rouged cheeks, for she kept casting tender glances at him,” the reporter wrote.

But something happened after the wedding that seemed to weigh in on the fake side.

The priest, the reporter wrote, “looked quite a benevolent old man in his long, flowing white beard, which, however, he took off and put away after the guests had gone.”

Diaa Hadid is a Mideast correspondent for The New York Times, based in East Jerusalem. You can follow her on Twitter @diaahadid.

A wedding portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, who married Franklin Delano Roosevelt in March 1905.Credit
Associated Press

The March 18, 1905, edition of The New York Times contained an article headlined “President Roosevelt Gives the Bride Away,” about the wedding of a couple who would go on to rank among the 20th century’s greatest Americans. Below is the article in its entirety, with annotation by the novelist Amy Bloom, who is working on a novel about Eleanor Roosevelt.

One of the most notable weddings of the year was that celebrated yesterday, when Miss Eleanor Roosevelt, daughter of the only brother of President Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a cousin of the President (1)

1. Eleanor and F.D.R. were fifth cousins, once removed, who met briefly at 14 and 18 but noticed each other for the first time four years later at a big horse show in Madison Square Garden in a box filled with Roosevelt cousins from both branches. Her father was F.D.R.’s godfather. F.D.R. proposed when Eleanor was 19 and he was 22. As has been said, it may be that Roosevelts so often married Roosevelts (known as Roosevelt-Roosevelts) because they never met anyone else. P.S., a lot of family friends felt that he was unworthy of her.

On Feb. 5, 1906, The Times ran a report of one Mrs. Alice Sewell of Swainsborough, Ga., who lost her husband, Mr. Sewell, to a monthslong illness.

A few days later, Mrs. Sewell attended his funeral, where she “attracted attention by the beauty of her mourning costume and also by the grief she manifested.”

But the widow, who had inherited her wealthy husband’s property, would end the day on a decidedly more cheerful note. Immediately following the services, she made her way to a judge’s office to marry Robert McDaniel, “who was a sweetheart of Mrs. Sewell before marriage.”

It appears the reporter detected a hint of amour earlier: “All through the services at the grave she was leaning on the arm of McDaniel.”

A 1912 wedding announcement for two brides in jail proves that love is not merely the domain of “good girls.”Credit
Joana Avillez

On July 22, 1912, a short but not so sweet wedding announcement appeared in The New York Times: “There was a double wedding last evening in the Oneida County Jail at Rome. Jessie Hanson and Tony Lemma and Sam Marziali and Flora Granger were the bridal couples. The women are serving short sentences, and, as their time is still unexpired, will have to spend the first part of their honeymoon in jail. The husbands are not prisoners.”

We’ve all heard plenty of stories about women who marry male prisoners — wardens seduced by sweet-talking inmates, vulnerable housewives with multiple children who fall for convicted murderers they meet on special dating sites. Heck, even Charles Manson had a beautiful young bride-to-be (though reports said she was caught two-timing him with one of his disciples at a rock and gem show and had plans to display his corpse for profit after his death, so who knows where that’s at).

You don’t have to have a doctorate in psychology to understand the narratives that might persuade a woman to marry a felon — a history of abuse, a fear of abandonment or, simply, an internalized notion that getting married after 40 is about as likely as meeting a leprechaun at the Polo Lounge and having him buy you a shrimp cocktail. There are women desperately trying to hold their families together. Then there’s love, some ersatz kind of romance. But love is complex, love involves forgiveness, and so many women have been trained to forgive, again and again, until they don’t know what they’re forgiving anymore.

Women have also been trained to be good. I know that I spend an extraordinary amount of time every day trying to determine whether or not I am a “good person,” a concept I understand to be meaningless, or at least impossible to define, on some level. Getting the dogs out the door before they piss on the rug means I am beginning the day responsibly. Ignoring my mother’s calls in favor of perusing Instagram is poor behavior. Screwing up a friend’s coffee order puts me at a serious deficit. Being 15 minutes late to lunch, then not being able to resist talking about my own mundane yet horrible morning is, to me, a crime worthy of incarceration.

By the time I hit my pillow at night, I am organizing a litany of awards and complaints, all just for me, and setting the stage for either a peaceful sleep or the recurring nightmare of my friends all lining up outside my apartment building to ask me to move to Wyoming, sans cellphone.

My boyfriend (who, half a decade in, has still not proposed, by the way) does an impression of me that drives me freaking insane. In a mousy, obsequious voice, he asks: “Am I a good giiiirl? Is anyone maaad at me? Have I been a sweetie today?” It makes me ill, but only because of how closely it echoes my true internal monologue.

For someone interested in history’s bravest revolutionaries and the power of art to disrupt the status quo, I sure am eager to pay for everyone’s lunch. Check paid for you, check mark for me.

Which brings me back to Jessie and Tony and Sam and Flora and their double jail wedding. The article gives no indication as to what Jessie and Flora did. Steal candy? Punch members of a rival girl gang? Solicit sex? But Tony and Sam didn’t care. Despite, or maybe because of, their lovers’ indiscretions, they insisted on marrying them right there in what would be considered by many, especially in 1912, the most shameful place on earth. They didn’t need them to be good girls. They were their girls. Love is not merely the domain of those who get your latte order right. It’s for everyone, everywhere, imperfect as one may be. A honeymoon in a jail cell is still a honeymoon.

Mary Landon Baker in 1922, sailing to England to marry Allister McCormick. (She didn't.)Credit
The New York Times

“Shyness” was the diagnosis: After all, what else could possibly have caused Mary Landon Baker — heiress and socialite — to have left her fiancé, Allister McCormick, a fellow Chicagoan, at the altar so often in the early 1920s?

Newspapers around the world — including The New York Times, which referred to the would-be groom as “thrice jilted Allister McCormick” — delighted in covering the drama that unfolded between the two. In the end, nothing could compel Miss Baker to become Mrs. McCormick: not the Cartier sapphire engagement ring, nor the mountain of wedding gifts (valued at a reported $100,000), nor the thousand well-heeled guests who showed up for the first wedding ceremony.

Called the “shy bride” by reporters, Miss Baker appears to have been anything but: Throughout the 1920s, she went through lovers like General Sherman blazing a path to the sea and provided excellent copy while doing so. (Mr. McCormick abandoned his pursuit of Miss Baker in 1923, opting instead for a more compliant wife based in London).

Miss Baker acquired and discarded husband-candidates on at least two continents: an English Lord, an Irish prince, a Spaniard of means. Her brief 1926 engagement to a Yugoslav diplomat caused “the greatest excitement since the European war” in Belgrade, reported one Times correspondent.

Miss Baker was also linked to the actor Barry Baxter, who collapsed onstage and died during their friendship; rumors flew that he had learned that Miss Baker was about to dispatch herself to London to marry another man. Mr. Baxter’s physician came forward to deliver the disappointing news: The cause of death had been pneumonia, not betrayal or lovesickness. Thus Miss Baker remained categorized as simply shy rather than fatale.

By the time she died in 1961, at age 61, she had supposedly received 65 marriage proposals.

Her love of life seemed abundant; she was, for example, fond of pirate parties, tango dancing with Romanian princes and glinting lamé gowns. Furthermore, Miss Baker was a quintessential “dollar princess,” an heiress whose net worth made her an international catch.

When quizzed about his daughter’s aversion to marriage, her father, the financier Alfred Baker, suggested to a reporter that she was simply having too delectable a time playing the field to settle down. Years later, Miss Baker told a journalist, “I did not marry, because I did not meet the right man at the right time at the right place.” At another point, she confessed, “I have never been in love.”

It seems a perfectly valid reason to have shunned the affections of so many men, although it was a luxurious position to be able to take. We will probably never know Miss Baker’s motives in marionetting her suitors, but we do know this: She was never in need of spousal support. In 1927, when her father died, she made the leap from heiress to outright rich in her own right; she received another small fortune upon her mother’s death in 1955. She had security; she had status. Mary Landon Baker wasn’t “shy.” Rather, she was free.

True love happens in times both good and bad. But when the economy plummets, marriage rates nose-dive as well.

Consider an article in The New York Times dated June 2, 1932, during the depths of the Great Depression, about the decline in marriage license applications. Indeed, even the prospect of winning a black silk top hat wasn’t enough to draw crowds to the license bureau at City Hall, the article proclaimed. By early afternoon on June 1, officials had granted only 22 license applications, roughly half the number of a year earlier.

That those marriage license applications were still declining almost three years after the 1929 stock market crash is a testament to just how profoundly the economic downturn of the 1930s affected Americans. Although the crash was a cataclysmic event that many consider the beginning of the Depression, the worst of the downturn occurred years later.

The day of The Times’s report on marriage license applications, the Dow Jones industrial average closed at around 47, down 88 percent from its peak of 381 on Oct. 3, 1929. About one month after the article appeared, the Dow Jones collapsed to around 41.

Throughout the early 1930s, the government was still devising legislation in response to the improprieties on Wall Street that had emerged. The banking law known as Glass-Steagall, meant to address the conflicts of interest in the banking industry that had harmed so many consumers and small investors, did not pass until 1933.

While readers of The Times may not have realized it, in June 1932, the stock market was about to begin its slow upward reversal. By mid-1934, it had rallied to around 97.

This recovery, although painfully sluggish, was perhaps reflected in a lengthy Times report on June 10, 1934 about bridal traditions. Headlined “Though the World Changes, the June Bride Is Eternal,“ the feature compared then-current brides with those of five decades earlier.

And although the report acknowledged the vexing economy and what it meant for brides and grooms, it also conveyed a growing sense of hope among newlyweds.

“Certain young married women are for the first time hunting paying jobs and facing the difficulties attendant on the consequent double task of running a home and an office,” the article said.

Nevertheless, it continued: “Once again, the wedding awnings are up on the avenue, the roads leading to Westchester and Long Island are sprinkled with small cars full of gay young men in tall silk hats, and cream-colored envelopes flood the mails. It is June, and for better or worse, the brides are walking the aisles.”

Gretchen Morgenson is a business columnist and reporter at The New York Times.

Theodora Roosevelt marries Thomas C. Keogh (right), an artist, in a modest ceremony at the Little Church Around the Corner, 1945. Her father, Lieut. Col. Archibald B. Roosevelt, is on the left. Credit
The New York Times

Once the United States joined World War II, the urge to get married among many young couples proved too compelling to resist. In 1942 alone, 1.8 million weddings took place, up 83 percent from 10 years before. And two-thirds of those brides were marrying men newly enlisted in the military.

Few places epitomized this wartime rush to the altar more than the affectionately named Little Church Around the Corner, on East 29th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues in Manhattan, where couples would line up in the Episcopal church’s ivy-covered courtyard, awaiting their turn.

In 1942 and 1943, more than 2,000 weddings were performed at the Church of the Transfiguration, the Little Church’s official name. In 1943, the church’s rector, the Rev. Dr. Randolph Ray, said that three ceremonies in the morning and three in the afternoon represented a “quiet midweek schedule” for him.

Still, the rector tried to apply some prewar standards to the thousands of wartime marriages he sanctioned. In 1944, he even wrote, “Marriage Is a Serious Business,” a book for young couples in which he warned, “The hasty marriage, caused by glamour and excitement rather than by genuine affection, is one of the evil products of war.”

While wartime romance continued to win out, the pomp of the ceremony was rarely the point. Stories abounded throughout the country of small wedding cakes baked with rationed ingredients, and of brides wearing modest, nontraditional dresses, some even made of silk from the parachutes that had saved their grooms in battle.

The few weddings at the Little Church that were notable enough to be written up in The New York Times reflected that shift.

Photo

The Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration, affectionately known as the Little Church Around the Corner, on East 29th Street.Credit
Geo. P. Hall & Son/New-York Historical Society, via Getty Images

In June 1945, Dr. Ray presided at Theodora Roosevelt’s wedding to an artist. She was the granddaughter of former President Theodore Roosevelt, and a cousin of Eleanor Roosevelt. The Times reported that the couple had “dispensed with attendants” in a ceremony “witnessed only by immediate relatives.” The bride wore “a brown faille suit, and straw hat with brown veiling,” instead of a typical wedding gown.

And in another nod to wartime austerity within this privileged family, “a small reception was given at the home of the bride’s aunt, Mrs. Kermit Roosevelt of 9 Sutton Place,” after the ceremony at the Little Church.

This early glimpse of service journalism has a gloomy lede: “More than half of America’s 1,500,000 war-wed G.I.s have returned. Already one out of every four of these 800,000 men is entangled in divorce proceedings. Experts are predicting that by 1950, 1,000,000 of these wartime marriages – or two out of three – will end in divorce.”

Oof. Concluding that “the epidemic of G.I. divorces offers the public an insight into the entire divorce problem,” the reporter details the six main causes of marital dissolution – hasty marriages, separation, disillusionment, mésalliances (marriage to a person thought to be unsuitable or of a lower social position), fraternization and economic ills – and talks to experts about how such splits can be avoided.

As the picture editor and photo researcher for this series, I spent dozens of hours in the photo archives of The New York Times. The morgue, as we call it, is a vast subbasement stuffed to capacity with old photographs, newspaper clippings, books and artifacts related to the publication of The Times. Estimates put the number of pictures covering an array of subjects over a 100-year span at about 10 million.

I have spent many years exploring the collection, but no matter how focused I am in the beginning of a project, I inevitably get sidetracked. I can’t help but spot photographic trends and similarities. This time was no exception.

During a period that began during World War II and lasted through the end of the 1950s, photographers for The Times consistently took photographs of couples in the back seats of cars. The trend abruptly disappeared from our picture collection around 1960. From that point through the 1980s, most of the photographs I discovered were the classic studio bridal portrait, a style common in the early 20th century.

Was it a preference of newspaper editors and designers to change the photography style? Was it that the automobile was no longer considered a luxury? Was it that brides and grooms considered it a style from their parents’ generation? Or was it that religious institutions had begun to permit photography during ceremonies, giving couples more options?

Jewelle Taylor Gibbs and James Lowell Gibbs Jr. on their wedding day in Ansonia, Conn., 1956.Credit
DeWhitt Keith

“We were always the first this or the first that,” Jewelle Taylor Gibbs said as she looked back on her 60-year marriage to James Lowell Gibbs Jr.

They met in 1954 when he was a graduate student in anthropology at Harvard and the university’s first African-American resident tutor. She was a senior at Radcliffe and the only black student in her class.

Both recall that their courtship involved many long conversations over coffee. He was a quiet intellectual while she was an outspoken, vivacious one who could be fierce when debating issues like civil rights and minority hiring.

“She was quite well dressed, and she wore her clothes well,” Mr. Gibbs, now 85, said. “I remember particularly a red velvet halter dress.” He could not remember, however, how or when he proposed to her. Nevertheless, an announcement of their engagement appeared in The New York Times on June 3, 1956.

“Our families were pleased and proud that the announcements were included on the social pages,” Ms. Gibbs, now 83, said in an email. “But we were also keenly aware that this editorial decision was symbolic and reflected the changing racial attitudes in American society.”

Just months after the wedding, the couple moved to a Liberian village where Mr. Gibbs began an anthropological study of village life. The couple lived in a mud hut with rats running over the roof.

“It was not easy,“ Ms. Gibbs recalled. "We didn’t have electricity or plumbing or television. There were adventures every single day. We became very good friends, which I think is the basis for a good marriage.”

There were more firsts to come for the couple. In 1966, they moved to Palo Alto, Calif., so Mr. Gibbs could take a job as an anthropology professor at Stanford. He eventually became the first tenured African-American professor there.

“This ‘first black’ designation was a mixed blessing,” Ms. Gibbs wrote in her 2014 autobiography, “Destiny’s Child: Memoirs of a Preacher’s Daughter.” “You are expected to represent the whole race, you are always under the microscope, and you can’t afford to fail.”

When their two sons, Geoffrey and Lowell, were 4 and 6, she began pursuing a master’s degree in social work at the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to earn a Ph.D. in psychology, and eventually joined the Berkeley faculty.

Photo

Jewelle and James Gibbs, photographed in Oakland, Ca. last fall. Their engagement and wedding announcements appeared in The Times in 1956.Credit
Jim Wilson/The New York Times

In 1970, Mr. Gibbs became the first dean of undergraduate studies at Stanford. There was a growing number of black students on campus and a pervasive sense that racism was waning.

“My husband and I were much more optimistic in the ’60s than we are today,” Ms. Gibbs said. “We saw change happening rapidly and it was good change. Then, all of a sudden, we hit this wall.”

In 2010, they moved to a retirement community in Oakland.

Death does not seem to scare either of them. They have chosen side-by-side cemetery plots, and Ms. Gibbs, who still enjoys dressing up for parties, has begun giving her clothes away. “It’s part of the last stage of life,” she said. “I hope I’m going somewhere where I don’t need a lot of winter clothes.”

The irreverent credo of the 1960s counterculture was “Do your own thing.” Many brides took that to heart in planning their weddings.

Formal weddings set in hotel ballrooms and churches continued, of course. But the alternative brides of the day rejected the regal white gown and veil, for a pared-down look more in keeping with the times.

Some looked to high-profile role models whose offbeat or rarefied tastes often set the tone for the young and sometimes star-struck bride-to-be. Their inspirations included avatars of cool like Jane Fonda, who married the director Roger Vadim in 1965 while wearing a sleeveless high-waist sheath; Yoko Ono, who wed John Lennon in a white minidress accessorized with knee-length socks and sneakers; Talitha Getty, who seemed every inch a snow princess in the hooded, fur-rimmed white minidress she wore to marry the oil heir John Paul Getty in 1966; and Sharon Tate, who designed a high-necked, puff-sleeved, micro-minidress for her 1968 wedding to the director Roman Polanski.

Photo

John Lennon and Yoko Ono, both dressed in white, board a private plane in Gibraltar after their wedding on March 20, 1969.Credit
Simpson/Express, via Getty Images

The cerebral among them were apt to take their style cues from literary beacons like Joan Didion, who was unmoved as a child by her playmates’ sugarcoated fantasies. “I would let other 6-year-olds imagine their wedding days, their princess dresses, their Juliet caps and seed pearls and clouds of white tulle,” she once wrote. The short silk dress Ms. Didion wore in 1964 when she married the writer John Gregory Dunne reinforced her stature as a thinking woman’s idol.

As the decade wore on, women continued to set themselves apart from their parents’ generation by adopting the flouncy, vibrant look of rock and folk icons like Stevie Nicks and Joni Mitchell, or, alternately, the boho-ethnic trappings of popular music festivals. Some brides went barefoot and wore garlands in their hair.

Those flourishes, well suited to the wildflower-strewn meadows where so many spoke their vows, remained the indie touchstones for brides throughout the 1970s and have left their maverick stamp on weddings to this day.

Marian Wright Edelman and Peter Edelman on their wedding day in 1968.Credit
Capitol and Glogau

When Marian Wright and Peter Edelman married in July 1968, their wedding was like an armistice. In April, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated; two months later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was murdered — on June 6, Mrs. Edelman’s birthday. For years afterward, the couple would spend that day at Arlington Cemetery. The national tragedies were personal for the couple: Mrs. Edelman had worked for Dr. King, and Mr. Edelman had been an aide to the senator.

The New York Times covered the wedding as a news story, sending Nan Robertson, then a reporter for the paper’s Washington bureau. The ceremony was held on the lawn at the home of their friend, Adam Walinsky, a speechwriter for Senator Kennedy, in McLean, Va. The choice to marry in Virginia was deliberate: A year earlier, the state’s law against interracial marriage had been struck down in a suit brought by Richard and Mildred Loving. The Edelmans were the third interracial couple to marry there after the Lovings prevailed.

“I hate barriers,” Mrs. Edelman said. “And it was a time to bring down barriers.”

Fashion designer Jon Haggins married his model June Murphy at one of his fashion shows in 1970. Bill Cunningham, far left in white jacket, was on hand to photograph the event.Credit
Jack Manning/The New York Times

Jon Haggins, now 72, was a fashion designer in New York City in the 1970s and ’80s. Known for making a statement, Mr. Haggins invited guests to a fashion show in September 1970, promising a wedding at the end. Mr. Haggins retired from fashion and is now the host of the travel show GlobeTrotter TV. This interview has been edited and condensed.

This was over in Tudor City, on a friend’s terrace, which holds 200 people. It was just an incredible day. The wind took her veiling and wrapped it around the two of us. The sun was right, the weather was right and it was a great time.

I thought it was a cheap way to have a wedding, honestly. And it was really different. The guests were trying to guess, “Which model is he going to marry?” as the models kept coming out.

I met June when she came into the studio to collect her money from doing a show. It was just something magical when she walked in. They say you shouldn’t flirt with your employees. But this was just something that happened. I was deeply in love with her.

June didn’t want a typical wedding and she didn’t want a typical dress. She wanted something very special and didn’t want any of the dresses I had designed previously. So we did a special dress for her that didn’t look like a typical wedding dress.

The sides were open all the way down to the waist. A cowl front and a cowl back. It draped like a handkerchief and it was a slim, easygoing dress. She’s wearing a long scarf, and a florist that I know painted the butterfly on it, and it just flowed down the back.

We were together for about six months before getting married. I just felt it was time to do it. I was 27.

We were married a year and a half. We just had different visions. It was a bitter divorce. It was a very special time in my life and I wish it had lasted.

I still have a little thing here [points to his heart] for her. It’s something I never quite got over.

Jaclyn Peiser is a news assistant and contributing reporter for The New York Times, where she also writes wedding announcements.

Poufs, shoulder pads and embellishments were part of the 1980s ethos. “Too much was not enough,” to paraphrase Mark Twain. And that was just for cocktails. Bridal couture took it to a higher level, if you can imagine. Consider the overwhelming influencer of the era, Lady Diana Spencer, who wed Prince Charles in 1981, in “the wedding of the century.” Her train was 25 feet long, or about the height of a two-story building.

Wedding gowns of the decade frequently had lacy bibs on their bodices and high necklines. Any one would have made a luxurious bedspread for a California king. Shoulders emphasized with pads the size of those worn by fullbacks kept us upholstered.

Hair was similarly large. There were curls and tight perms, often heralded by feathery bangs, which no veil could completely obscure. At the time, of course, the froufrou look just felt right. But now, those of us who married in the 1980s know this to be true: Our wedding fashions made us look like Hummel figurines.

When I became engaged in 1987, I wanted to bypass a big event and have a tiny family ceremony at my parents’ house. Thus, I didn’t need a gown at all, just a simple white dress. Hard at work on a book I was terrified I would never finish, I committed all of two hours to finding one.

My mother and I didn’t go to any of New York’s bridal salons — not the department stores, nor to Kleinfeld’s. We went instead to Martha, a kind of dowager Park Avenue designer dress emporium that no longer exists. On this particular day, Carolina Herrera was having a trunk show, with models.

What we saw was encrusted with sequins and paillettes and large full skirts. Then a model came out wearing a white silk sheath with large jet black epaulets. It seemed that if those epaulets could be removed, what was underneath might work: utterly simple, low key, even rewearable. After a serious conference, Martha and the designer agreed to desparkle the dress. As the frock was now completely plain, my mother insisted that I also get it in a long version, with a large silk taffeta skirt for the larger wedding reception. I was happy with my choices; I thought they were elegant and timeless.

My two daughters do not share this opinion. I had held onto the Herreras in case either of them wanted to wear them one day. It’s unlikely. “So ugly and boxy,” one said. “The shoulder pads are terrible,” said the other. “It did nothing for your figure either.”

In the 1980s, career women like me didn’t feel powerful the way our daughters do today. Body-consciousness wasn’t something we did. And when I see my friends’ wedding photographs from that decade, they were usually wearing something more Miss Havisham-esque than my austere white chemise. Or so I thought. A second glance at the silhouette of my dress would make anyone think, “That’s so ’80s.”

Lisa Birnbach published her first book in 1980, The Official Preppy Handbook. Since then she has produced about 20 more books and about 3 children.

These days, extravagant proposals are a meme. But before the internet, they were little more than a bold gamble. Doug Shafner, a lifelong one-upper, now 74, was willing to take the risk when he walked into The New York Times building in 1982 with the intention of buying a small front-page ad. The following interview has been edited and condensed.

I had been married before, and this time I really wanted to do something that was a little more original. I have always endeavored to outdo New York on New York terms, and maybe stick a little tongue in cheek as well. It was an idea that came to me when I was scanning columns and seeing these occasional drop-ins that they used to do with “Happy Birthday,” “Happy Anniversary,” and I said to myself, “Gee, they could probably do a wedding in there as well.” I had the thought in my head, and I was at a favorite watering hole at lunch, having my meal and a couple of glasses of wine — I mean, those were the post-“Mad Men” days — and I mentioned to the bartender what I was thinking of doing. He said: “You really ought to do it. Here, let me buy you another glass of wine.”

So I had another glass of wine. Then I got into a cab, went to the Times building, asked for classifieds, came to a receptionist and was ushered into the back. I don’t recall if it was a man or woman who I spoke to, but the person’s jaw kind of dropped open like, “That’s what you want to do?” And then the person conferred with one or two colleagues who said, “Yeah that can be done.” So I placed it.

I think at the time it was about $250 or $300 to do that. In today’s dollars that would probably be $800 to $1,000, but whatever it was, for something that was going to be so one-of-a-kind, cost was really not the object to me. Before I left there, I was told what the likely publication date was.

I had a great relationship with the doorman. In those days, The Times used to be delivered to stores the night before. I asked the doorman to go out and get The Times for me — there was a very important story that I needed, if he wouldn’t mind bringing it up to me. At the time, I was with my girlfriend (later, my fiancée), and I said to her, “There’s an important story in The Times that I’ve got to see, on the front page.” So I called the doorman, he brought the paper to me and looked at me quizzically. I gave him a nice tip and he left. Then I said to my girlfriend, “Here’s the story, it’s on El Salvador. Just read it and then you’ll see why I wanted to get the paper.” When she got to the bottom of the page, she saw, “Suzanne, I adore you: Will you marry me?” And her mouth dropped open, and she said, “Yes, I will.”

A year later, Daniel Andrew Gross and Steven Goldstein popped the question.

The Times demurred but this time did not shut the door entirely. Then, after a few more days’ thought, it said yes.

The question, of course, was, “Will you print an announcement of our civil union in your society pages?”

Photo

Steven Goldstein, in blue shirt, and Daniel Andrew Gross, at a 2004 event in New Jersey. In 2002, their same-sex partnership was announced in the New York Times wedding pages.Credit
Nancy Wegard for The New York Times

Mr. Goldstein was checking his desktop computer in Brooklyn on a Sunday morning, shortly before their commitment ceremony. Awaiting him was a message from The Times. “I started screaming: ‘Daniel! Daniel! The New York Times has changed its policy!’” he said. “‘And we’re going to be the first couple!’”

When Elizabeth Morris Cromwell and Thomas Guthrie Speers III agreed to marry, their engagement was announced on Dec. 26, 1993, in The New York Times. “Mr. and Mrs. P. McEvoy Cromwell of Baltimore have announced June wedding plans for their daughter, Elizabeth Morris Cromwell, to the Rev. Thomas Guthrie Speers 3d, a son of the Rev. and Mrs. T. Guthrie Speers Jr. of Center Sandwich, N.H.”

“It was just the thing you did when you got engaged,” Mrs. Speers said.

The Speers, who are still married and now live in Delaware, were among the last couples to make such an announcement in the newspaper. On Jan. 2, 1994, a note explained: “Starting today, the Weddings pages will be devoted entirely to reports of marriages. Engagement notices will be discontinued to create space for a larger number of weddings each week.”

Reports of same-sex civil unions were not included in the society pages until 2002, though pressure had been mounting since the early 1990s to include announcements of gay commitment ceremonies. Max Frankel, the executive editor of The Times from 1986 to 1994, said recently that he had resisted publishing those announcements because, as he put it, “I didn’t think society was ready.”

Mr. Frankel’s position was that the newspaper would not include same-sex weddings until they received full legal sanction. (Vermont would legalize same-sex civil unions in 2000.)

Then it dawned on him that marriage engagements themselves, like same-sex commitment ceremonies, were self-proclaimed and unofficial. In his 1999 memoir, “The Times of My Life and My Life With The Times,” Mr. Frankel explained, “Before anyone had time to catch my inconsistency, I killed the engagement notices, taking credit for saving us space, paper and endless lobbying from the betrothed.”

The last batch of engagement notices included the Speers, the grandson of a founder of the John Birch Society and the daughter of an African-American bus driver in the Bronx and 33 other couples (including a pair of parents announcing two affianced sons in one go).

Some things never change: the front page on Dec. 26, 1993, led with intelligence reports indicating that North Korea had a nuclear bomb. Society, however, moves on: The Times began announcing same-sex civil unions in 2002 and same-sex marriages in 2004, though engagement announcements have yet to return.

Alessandra Stanley, a former New York Times reporter, foreign correspondent and critic, is a writer based in New York.

Men have been making light of what they see as “women’s stuff” for centuries, and quite possibly forever. Calling the wedding notices in The New York Times “the women’s sports pages” is a classic.

It’s something I can picture from an old black and white movie. “Muffie da-ha-ling,” a man possibly named Howard asks. “What are you doing?”

Muffie, who is tired and has her waist cinched in, snarls, “I’m reading The New York Times.”

“Oh, you mean the women’s sports pages?” he chortles dismissively.

Muffie shoots him a dirty look. And who can blame her. Because when the men try to name things from their own point of view, they often get it wrong.

The women’s sports pages is one of them.

It was mentioned in a “Sex and the City” episode (though not my column, on which the show was based) nearly two decades ago, and while I suppose it should make one cringe, it’s too illogical an analogy to get all hot and bothered about.

Consider the word “sports.” Is there something sporting or sporty about wedding announcements or marriage?

Sports implies competition, and, indeed, there is a competition for a mate.

But after that the whole sports/women/marriage thing begins to fall apart.

While sports may connote competition, the word also brings to mind a leisure activity, a sort of “take me out to the ballgame” situation. Today’s married woman may be sporty, she may be watching her own children play sports, but she is not leisurely. She runs, she hops, she tasks and triple-tasks in an effort to positively influence the sphere of needy beings around her.

Also, calling wedding announcements the women’s sports pages implies that men are not involved. I don’t know about the rest of you out there, but last time I checked men were doing a lot of marrying. A lot.

Which brings us to the last implication about sports. Most sports demand a winner and a loser. Marriage? Just the opposite. A winner and another winner. Two winners.

In fact, it’s kind of the opposite of sports, this marriage thing, this legally joining of two people who believe they can make it as partners. In fact, it’s a hell of a lot more like the mergers and acquisitions page, if you really think about it.

But forget about that. The main reason people read about weddings is to remind themselves that love is real and that people are still showing up for it. So maybe it’s time for a new analogy. Any ideas?

Inspired by Lisa Birnbach’s essay, “My Big Fat ’80s Wedding Dress,” we asked readers to share photos of their ’80s ensembles. Here is a selection featuring ruffles, puffy sleeves and, of course, over the top gowns.

Photo

Bonnie C. Likely, who studied fashion design in college, on her wedding day, Oct. 24, 1987, in Dumont, N.J. She wore a gown she designed and made herself. “I hoped to look different than the other brides of the era,” said Ms. Likely. “No big shoulders and no big hair.”Credit
Bonnie C. Likely
Photo

Mary Lee Dunn and William J. Dunn Jr., were married on June 12, 1982, in Brookline, Mass. “My wedding gown was from House of Bianchi, a Boston designer in those days,” said Ms. Dunn. “I loved the gown and it was the only one I tried on.”Credit
Mary Lee Dunn
Photo

Ms. Kobrick’s custom gown was constructed with an oversized bow on the back. Credit
Felice Kobrick

A rendering of the 1893 wedding reception of Chu Fong, Chinatown’s richest man, and his bride, Lum San Toy.Credit
Joana Avillez

They were curiosities. Described in terms both outdated and insulting — Orientals, foreigners, Chinamen — the wedding rituals and banquets of couples of Asian descent drew an anthropological interest from reporters at The New York Times. Recounted in tiny type on inside pages, their romances were, nevertheless, news for a city teeming with new arrivals.

Today, of course, wedding announcements for couples of Asian descent are folded into the newspaper’s wedding pages with everyone else’s. In the early years, however, marriages unusual enough to note were often unions between whites and people of Asian descent, most of which were rendered downright scandalous.

In February 1913, The Times told of Marion Law, a Brooklyn woman who had rejected her mother’s wishes and married Frank Law, a Chinese merchant, “out of spite.”

The couple moved to China, and Mrs. Law got her comeuppance, in the view of The Times. “Girl Didn’t Want Man Mother Chose — Children Now in Home,” the subhead read. Mr. Law had died in China, forcing Mrs. Law to return and place their three children in a children’s home in Hackensack, N.J.

“Her parents have not been reconciled to the marriage,” the article added.

Evelyn Kendall Moy, who had been raised in China, was set to marry Henry F. Hinkley of Miles City, Mont., in December 1924, but their minister “refused to perform the ceremony because of a state law prohibiting the marriage of Chinese and whites.” For the Montana marriage to happen, the newspaper reported, Ms. Moy’s adoptive mother had to swear under oath that she was born to white parents.

The couples of Asian descent whose weddings The Times covered a century ago were usually well-to-do. The Oct. 15, 1893, edition described the wedding reception of Chu Fong, Chinatown’s richest man, and his bride, Lum San Toy, as “Half Oriental, Half New-York City Style, and Wholly Charming.” Guests included a senator and an assistant district attorney.

Mr. Chu wore a cardinal-red silk tunic; Ms. Lum, a jeweled headdress and a shell-pink silk gown over her tiny bound feet. Musicians “poured forth a greeting evidently delicious to Chinese ears, but novel in the extreme to the guests.”

In August 1943, Miss Shih-Yung Wang, an international law scholar at Fordham from a notable Shanghai family, wed Ek Khoo Tan, scion of a real estate family in Singapore who worked as a civil engineer in New York.

That is as far as their wedding announcement went. One of their daughters, Elaine Wang, a physician based in Toronto who works in the pharmaceutical industry, recently filled in the life that followed.

They lived at first on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. But after Mao Zedong’s rise to power scattered the elder Ms. Wang’s family in Shanghai, the couple joined Mr. Tan’s family in Singapore, then moved to Hong Kong. They divorced in the 1960s, and Mr. Tan returned to Singapore, where he went into politics and started a second family.

Ms. Wang opened a sophisticated boutique, flying to Europe each year and returning with the latest styles for elegant women across Southeast Asia.

She kept up the pace for decades. “One of the things my mother really stressed to me as I was growing up was, ‘You come from privilege, so you have to return to society, give back,’” Ms. Wang said.

Her mother died in 1984 and her father in the 1990s. He had lost touch with the three children from his first marriage, who knew little about his educational background.

When Ms. Wang read about the “Committed” series for The Times, she emailed us asking if we could find a copy of her parents’ wedding announcement, which she had heard about but had never seen.

https://static02.nyt.com/images/2017/02/05/fashion/00WP-Mallozzi/00WP-Mallozzi-facebookJumbo.jpg2017-02-14T08:00:57.057+00:00He Used To Cover Sports. Now? Love.Vinny Mallozzi's career has taken him from the Jets locker room to Donald J. Trump Jr.'s wedding reception. Here is a look at one of the 6,000 weddings he has covered.CreditBy SAMANTHA STARK and SHANE O’NEILLhttps://static02.nyt.com/images/2017/02/05/fashion/00WP-Mallozzi/00WP-Mallozzi-facebookJumbo.jpg

I’m not a priest or a rabbi or an online minister — nor do I play one on television — and yet I have married thousands of couples from around the world.

And while I have never led an exchange of vows, generations of brides and grooms who once gathered before me have shown thanks by sending emails and postcards from their honeymoons, and, on occasion, invitations to their wedding receptions.

My service comes complete with a query that renders women of all tongues rather speechless: “Will you be taking your husband’s last name or keeping your own?” (Silence or stuttering follows, as brides are suddenly faced with having to process, and reveal for the record, the fate of their surnames, some of which will remain in place or join the company of a hyphen, while others will disappear upon the words “I do.”)

I am no man of the cloth. I’m a reporter on the society news desk of The New York Times, an institution known in some circles as the “cathedral of journalism,” which means I get to marry people in print. These are both ordinary and extraordinary people, from chauffeurs to descendants of Mayflower passengers, as well as military heroes, hedge-fund honchos, construction workers, news anchors, actors, screenwriters, people with absolutely no acting or screenwriting credits who claim to be actors and screenwriters, and that lazy Californian who asked in a sleepy voice on a late Monday afternoon if I might be good enough to refer to him, in print, as a “gentleman of leisure.”

My dedicated service to the wedded masses began with a calling some 14 years ago — a call I made myself, from my desk at The Times, to the first couple whose wedding announcement I put together. Thousands have flocked to me since, all eager to achieve a hallowed status: having one’s wedding announced in The Times, a tradition of social posts that began gracing the pages of this newspaper eons before the arrival of Facebook.

“I’ve been wanting to have my announcement printed in The Times since I was a little girl” is the most common and joyous refrain among brides, regardless of age, race and social status.

By the power vested in me by my status as a wedding reporter, I pronounced each of these marriages news fit to print, and if any person out there can show just cause to the contrary, speak now or forever hold your corrections.

Vinny Mallozzi worked for the Sports section of The New York Times from 1986 until 2003, when he became a Weddings reporter and lived happily ever after.

Dozens of couples were married in a mass Valentine’s Day wedding ceremony on the steps of the Bexar County Courthouse in San Antonio, Tex., in 2014.Credit
Eric Gay/Associated Press
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About 47 Palestinian brides waited for their grooms during a mass wedding that took place in the city of Nablus in 2010. The mass wedding was sponsored by the Palestinian Authority and held under the patronage of its president, Mahmoud Abbas. Credit
Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times
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Indigenous couples participated in a collective wedding in Cobija, Bolivia, in 2012. The ceremony was arranged by the government and performed according to traditions from the Amazon. Credit
Juan Karita/Associated Press
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Kyrgyz couples took part in a mass wedding ceremony in the capital Bishkek in 2012. Credit
Vyacheslav Oseledko/AFP/Getty Images
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Indian couples were wed in a mass wedding ceremony in Virar, on the outskirts of Mumbai, India, in 2012. More than 1,000 couples were married during the event that was organized by a local politician. Credit
Rajanish Kakade/Associated Press

The wedding they had planned at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture was just four days away. Now, it would also be a mere three miles away from the smoldering rubble where the World Trade Center had stood.

Quickly, they had to figure out whether to cancel their plans or push forward. “I remember ash on the cars and smoke in the air burning all week, and fighter jets flying, noises you never heard in New York City,” Mr. Feinberg said. “That was the mood.”

The couple, who met while working at Facing History and Ourselves, a nonprofit that teaches students about genocide, found the courage to follow through on their plans — as did 34 other couples also featured in the Sept. 16, 2001, weddings pages in The New York Times.

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Tracy Garrison-Feinberg and Kevin Feinberg in their Brooklyn home this month.Credit
Stephen Speranza for The New York Times

Three of those unions took place in Manhattan, including one at Studio 450, a rooftop space on West 31st Street, within eyeshot of ground zero.

Jenn Goldstone, a former ABC News producer who was the bride in that ceremony, said she had picked the site “for its beautiful downtown views, which obviously became a complicated thing” after the attacks.

She and her fiancé at the time, Thomas Goldstone, also a producer, worked until 3 a.m. covering the news the day of the attacks, then went for hamburgers “to decide if we were still getting married.”

The weddings pages that Sunday had a reassuring veneer of normalcy to them. Photos showed newlyweds hugging and a smiling bride hoisted on a chair. The vignettes were bare-bones, but the tone as sunny as the skies that indelible Tuesday.

The cover of the Sunday Styles section included an article with more context about events that had been put off or moved that weekend. It mentioned the wedding of a couple whose announcement was published that day and who had booked Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, but had relocated to Connecticut because the church had been too badly damaged.

The next Sunday, a Vows column profiled the couple, Carleton Goodnow and Anne Dewey, whose wedding had taken place on Sept. 15 in the backyard of the Goodnow home in Darien, Conn.

The couple worried about seeming unfeeling as they sought alternatives for their Trinity Church wedding.

At one point, the groom recommended postponement, but he was overruled by his fiancé’s mother.

To get a photo in The Times’s announcements, it helps if the bride’s peepers are not a foot below those of her beloved.Credit
Collage by Angelica McKinley

Hillary Kerr is one of the founders of Clique Media Group, the company behind the celebrity fashion website Who What Wear. Its Instagram feed has more than two million followers, and it generates more than 12 million unique monthly visitors.

That is to say, Ms. Kerr, 37, knows a lot about selecting compelling photographs for publication.

Or so she thought, until it came time to submit a photo of her and her fiancé, Jonathan Leahy, 38, for consideration by The New York Times wedding section.

In its guidelines, The Times offers this instruction for photo submissions: “Couples posing for pictures should arrange themselves with their eyebrows on the same level and with their heads fairly close together with plenty of space at the top and sides of the couple’s heads.”

Having eyes level in a photograph allows editors to crop images without cutting off the top of one person’s head or the chin of the other.

This is harder than you’d think. “We both have very large heads, but they’re large in different ways,” she said. “I’m wide, he’s deep. It makes the ‘eye level’ thing difficult.” She vetted 500 photos.

The couple’s marriage in December was the subject of a Vows column. These features, longer than a regular announcement, allow for larger photos, and, luckily for the couple, are exempt from the eyes-level rule.

Todd Schneider, 33, is also aware of the tyranny of the eyes-level mandate. He is a data scientist and software engineer who, on sort of a lark, wrote computer code in 2013 to analyze the demographics of those whose weddings are featured in The Times and created a website called Wedding Crunchers.

Last winter, when he attended a brunch for his just-married friends Olivia and Daniel Berger, Mr. Schneider looked at the newspaper section being passed around among the couple’s relatives and friends. He asked the groom: “How’d you get in the wedding section? Your eyes are way off.”

In an interview, Mr. Berger described the difficulty (even after hiring a photographer) of getting an eyes-level photo because he is five inches taller than his wife. “I had to stoop down, which affected my posture and bearing.” In the photo submitted, Ms. Berger stood on a step and Mr. Berger’s posture was upright. Their eyes were still slightly off-level, but they made the cut.

Mr. Schneider’s interest was piqued. He created a computer montage (watch it here) to demonstrate the faithfulness to eye-levelness of couples in The Times. (He found the 2010 wedding announcement of 6-foot-plus Jon S. Corzine, a former governor of New Jersey, was among the worst offenders.)

Jason Trentacoste, 36, and Liza Browne, 37, can appreciate the challenges of the eyes-level photo. “I’m 6-foot-3, and she’s 5-foot-2½,” said Mr. Trentacoste, a private banker and artist in Asharoken, N.Y., who married Ms. Browne, a spa owner, in December.

In looking for a photo, Mr. Trentacoste focused on ones in which he and Ms. Browne were sitting, which offered them their best chance. Still nothing.
After scanning 2,500 images, he noticed an outtake from a photo shoot taken after their engagement. They were posed outdoors sitting on rocks. Bingo! “My rock happened to be a lot lower than her,” Mr. Trentacoste said, “so our eyes magically aligned.” They smiled happily ever after.

Katherine Rosman is a reporter for the Styles section of The New York Times. Follow her on Twitter @katierosman.

The Wedding section of The New York Times has had some success in featuring a more diverse selection of newlyweds over the years. But more can be done.Credit
The New York Times

In the Wedding section of The New York Times, we often hear criticism that we publish only the wedding announcements of the sons and daughters of society’s white upper crust.

That is not true, of course. But even though we have had some success over the years in diversifying those represented in our wedding pages, in terms of both race and economic background, we know we can do better.

The Times is hardly new to the coverage of nonwhite newlyweds. This series, which explores 165 years of Times wedding announcements, shares some of those of stories, from Ida B. Wells to Jewelle and James Gibbs to Marian Wright and Peter Edelman.

As part of our quest to do better in finding couples from underrepresented groups, we are encouraging everyone to submit their announcement for consideration.

We ask that you shed any preconceived idea of who will or who will not be accepted into our pages. For example, you don’t need wealthy parents or an ancestor who came over on the Mayflower. We want to read about accomplished and interesting couples from all walks of life. That word — “accomplished” — does not only apply to brides or grooms who graduated summa cum laude, or clerked at the Supreme Court, or sit on the board of a Fortune 500 company. We have featured the weddings of police officers, truck drivers and letter carriers, too.

Remember: We can choose couples only from the submissions we receive.

Our selection process is subjective and sometimes excruciating, and many factors come into play, including how much print space and resources are available in any given week.

Edward Koren’s cartoon, published on Feb. 22, 1999 in The New Yorker magazine, skewers a couple who are perhaps a little too proud of getting into The New York Times.

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Cartoon by Edward Koren/The New Yorker

The Sunday wedding announcements in The New York Times have long been a fertile hunting ground for writers of parodies, hate-reads and other forms of snark.

The best explanation of why our wedding pages make such a tempting target was provided by Robert Baedeker, one of the authors of “Weddings of The Times,” a 2009 book parodying our reports, during an interview on National Public Radio.

“The wedding announcements in The Times are so perfect and polished, and the inspiration comes from that sort of primal feeling one gets when one sees a perfect picture, which is to scribble a mustache on it or draw some sunglasses on it,” Mr. Baedeker said.

Julie Spira’s wedding announcement ran in The Times in November 1989.Credit
Herman Paris Photography

Julie Spira had what she calls a “starter marriage.” It lasted about a year. The electronic record of it, however, lives in perpetuity online.

Ms. Spira, a writer and online dating expert, made this discovery in the early 2000s, after a friend urged her to search herself online. The No.1 result on Google: Her New York Times wedding announcement from more than 15 years earlier.

“I was just kind of stunned because there was no public internet at the time of the marriage,” said Ms. Spira, whose announcement appeared in The Times in November 1989. “I never had to worry about this permanent digital footprint in the event” the marriage didn’t last.

Then panic set in.

“Every potential date is going to Google me and start asking me all about my starter marriage,” she said.

Her first attempt at redress was contacting The Times. Ms. Spira said she called the newspaper to request removal, and when her phone calls went nowhere, she wrote letters to the editor, asking, “Can you help a girl out?”

“Oh I begged,” Ms. Spira said. “I had this horrible feeling that it was going to haunt me.”

Her pleas were fruitless, though, as was her attempt to enlist the help of an online reputation management company, which helps people or businesses polish their online images.

(The Times, while sympathetic to readers who wish to alter or remove an article that has been published online, has a firm policy against “unpublishing.” “We consider the archive to be a permanent record” of The Times’s journalism, Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, said in 2013, and added that it is important to preserve that digital record.)

So Ms. Spira, an early adopter of the internet, decided to put on her “internet marketing hat,” and said, “Well, I market everyone else, I better market me, and I better push it down.”

She created a LinkedIn profile. She created a Plaxo profile. She created websites for her business. She created personal websites. And as time went on, and new platforms emerged, she created a Google profile, a Facebook page and a Twitter account.

Her efforts paid off. In the span of a few years, Ms. Spira said she had created enough content to bump her wedding announcement from the top slot in Google’s search results, all the way down to No.11.

But then she eased up — not because her announcement had dropped to the second page of Google results, but because a man on JDate quite unwittingly altered her mind-set.

They had corresponded online a few times before he sent her a message she paraphrases as, Hey, I just read your New York Times wedding announcement, and by the way, here’s mine.

“I laughed so hard,” she said, “because there was someone who was just like me, who wasn’t so serious about it.”

As a result, Ms. Spira said, she lightened up and started to think about her wedding announcement as part of her history — a part that, she points out, is now buried on the fourth page when you enter her name in Google.

“There are a lot of us out there that have New York Times wedding announcements from marriages that didn’t last,” Ms. Spira said. “We hope for better luck next time.”

So what will a Times wedding announcement look like 165 years from now? Here’s one idea.

Zuckerberg Anne Bezos and ZRT5771 were married Feb. 21, 2182. The Rev. Peter Thiel of the Church of Singularity officiated on 3362 Khufu, a private asteroid off Mars.

The bride, 29, is an editor for the OMG I Can’t Even section of The New York Times, previously known as the Sunday Review. She graduated from Harvard Citibank University.

The bride’s father, Wilhelm Bezos, is a professor of Bieberology at Northwestern University’s Pyongyang campus and the author of “Don’t Stop Beliebing: Pre-World War III American Popular Music.” Mr. Bezos is a descendant of Jeff Bezos, the 21st-century online retail entrepreneur turned Buddhist monk. The bride’s other father, Mark Zuckerberg IV, is an appraiser of antique emoji for Christie’s auction house.

Mr. ZRT5771, 5, is a substitute art teacher who is working on a memoir about artificial body image. He graduated from Vassar. He is a product of the android lab at GoogApple. His paternal great-great-great-great-great grandfather was the first iPad.

The couple met Feb. 21, 2180, waiting for the Hyperloop in the seaside resort town of Lincoln, Neb. They ran into each other later in the weekend, while swimming in the ocean with their respective groups of friends, but both were too shy to exchange DNA downloads. However, after thinking about Mr. ZRT5771 for the next several weeks, Ms. Bezos sent him a neural ping and they made a date. The following weekend, over cell-cultured roast beef sandwiches at Arby’s, they found themselves so absorbed in conversation that the manager had to ask them to leave because the restaurant was closing.

“At first I was just attracted to how hot he looked in his robokini,” Ms. Bezos said. “But as I got to know him, I realized he was also smart, loyal and funny. I’m looking forward to being together for all the years and software upgrades to come.”

Curtis Sittenfeld is a novelist and Matt Carlson is an associate professor of communication at Saint Louis University. They got married early in the 21st century.